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Timo Elliott's BlogTue, 05 Dec 2017 13:40:23 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.858428283Digitalist Magazine Q4 2017: More Than Noise!https://timoelliott.com/blog/2017/12/digitalist-magazine-q4-2017-more-than-noise.html
https://timoelliott.com/blog/2017/12/digitalist-magazine-q4-2017-more-than-noise.html#respondTue, 05 Dec 2017 12:56:20 +0000https://timoelliott.com/blog/?p=14026It’s that time of year again — time to snuggle up with your advent calendar and the latest copy of Digitalist Magazine Executive Quarterly, designed for people who lead the future.

Here’s my personal take on some of the highlights. If any of these grab you, then rush to install the iOS or Android app (sure, you can also access the links directly to the articles below, but trust me, the “magazine” experience is worth it. May I suggest you download it in time for your next ah-hem “joyful” travel experience?).

The Post Digital Age
Digitalist publisher Vivek Bapat‘s bottom line? Don’t digitalize the past—innovate the future! In other words, don’t adopt an incrementalist mindset, just adding digital on top of industrial-era foundations—aim for real transformation. [oh, and the data backs him up]

We’re living a VUKA WorldThe Fear Factor article by Bob Johansen talks about how we’re living in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world (VUCA). Tomorrow’s leaders have to navigate through disruption and extreme change while managing to make it tolerable — or even motivating! — for their employees.

A former journalist for The Telegraph, Jon moved to Channel 4 in 2015, and has helped raise the number of views of digital on social media from around five million views to over 250 million.

His story is a refreshing antidote to the fable of younger generations being only interested in memes and short videos because, counter-intuitively, the team achieved big gains by making the stories deeper, more serious, and more international.

Channel 4 is a UK public TV channel, but unlike the better-known BBC, it’s funded by advertising. It was specifically created for a younger audience, and to provide content that the more traditional BBC couldn’t easily provide. The channel aims to highlight content that challenges the dominant perceptions, with a diversity of opinions that don’t always get represented in the rest of the media.

What helps a video go viral?

The first three seconds. When somebody is scrolling down in Facebook, they’re not necessarily looking for a video. They’re in “discovery mode”, and you have the opportunity to show them things they didn’t know that they were looking for. You have a “three second audition” to grab their attention. The video has to start with a striking image — even an “emotional gut punch” — and you have to use text to create the most engaging opening possible.

Self-contained narratives. In order to get a wide viewership, it has to be more than a teaser or a trailer that tries to send people to another web site. For example, the video below came originally from a much longer documentary, with a slightly different overall story. The content was readapted to create an experience for the social audience. It was made shorter, obviously, but it also avoided the most shocking scenes, because that’s not the kind of thing you necessarily want to see in your news feed, and would made people hesitate to share it.

“These radical Islamist preachers took their extremist message to the streets of London and got shut down again and again by ordinary Muslims.”

The importance of identity. The Channel 4 videos are designed so that the act of sharing it helps show what kind of person you are. This allows people to indicate their values to others in a non-threatening way.

For example, the video below explains what’s happening in Syria. It’s an extremely complex conflict, and there’s a lot of pressure in social media to make everything simple, to boil it down to “5 basic facts about Syria”. But who wants to share content like that? It just makes the person sharing it look “basic”.

The Channel 4 team instead created “Who is fighting whom?” It has over four million views, not by dumbing the subject down, but by going into depth in an efficient, engaging way.

Design for mobile. The team’s research told them that the majority of videos are watched on mobile devices, and 85% are watching without sound. So videos have to be an audio-agnostic experience that can work on a small screen. The team views it once on a large screen, and then again on a phone with the sound off. It’s essential to test by consuming the content as your audience will.

Here’s an example of a video that was designed directly for mobile devices and social sharing with a square format. It’s the opposite of the high production values of the first video above, and done in a more humorous way. But it still embodies values that people can share with others, and has over 900,000 views: “If the EU were 100 people”.

The idea came from one of youngest members of the team, as part of the regular team discussions around “what would YOU like to cover?”.

Make it relevant. The team works hard to explain how unpopular stories are relevant to the audience. They constantly look for the universal value that lies behind the story, and why people should care.

For example, Bishop Edward Daley passed away last year. In Northern Ireland, on an infamous day known as Bloody Sunday, he had saved a lot of people by waiving a white handkerchief and bringing them to safety. But most of Channel 4’s audience wouldn’t have heard of him, or necessarily know much about the events of that day.

The first headline was something like “Bishop Edward Daley, Hero of Bloody Sunday, has died at 81”. Jon remembers thinking: “I commissioned this, and I wouldn’t even be interested in reading it!”

So instead the team opened up the video with “It was a selfless act of bravery on one of Britain’s darkest days”. Everybody can identify with that kind of emotion, and everybody is proud to share that kind of sentiment.

Another example was when Radovan Karadžić was found guilty of war crimes committed during the Balkan conflict. The team wanted to find a way to connect the events with a young audience who might not have heard anything about events such as Srebrenica, so they started the video with the phrase with “These were the death camps on the edge of the European Union, and it’s within living memory”. The effect is to portray that this is “clearly crucial knowledge you want to know about”.

And they opened a video about Bangladesh with the phrase “How one teenager summoned the courage to leave her house after a horrific acid attack”. In this case, the result was over fifteen million views, and the woman received lots of donations to help restore her sight.

Useful lessons for all educational content

Few of us have themes as important as Jon and his team to communicate. But the steps he’s outlined — explain why people should watch in ways that people can immediately understand, think about the reasons why people would share it with others, optimize for mobile devices without sound, etc. — are relevant for anybody trying to share content through social media.

It was the annual SAP Festival event last week in Geneva. There were separate days and agendas for HR, Supply Chain, and Finance professionals, and I presented the keynote for the Innovation Day part of the event, focused on the trends and technology behind digital business.

My presentation covered the challenges and opportunities of Digital Business, and how SAP can help with the new SAP Leonardo Digital Innovation System.

Along with other great examples like Stara and Mohawk Industries, I was able to showcase the local Cargo Sous Terrain project. It’s a wonderful example of completely rethinking problems and solutions using the latest technology.

In this case, Cargo Sous Terre intends to replace up to 40% of truck deliveries with a network of underground tunnels and autonomous vehicles. It sounds like science fiction, but the project has blue-chip investors and a solid business case. Using internet of things technology from SAP Leonardo, the first stretch four-city stretch of tunnels are due to go into operation as early as 2030.

The rest of the day went into the details of the technology behind the business opportunities, with separate tracks for companies interested in implementing the next-generation S/4HANA ERP platform, and for the SAP Cloud and Analytics portfolios.

Stefan Batzdorf gave an excellent overview of the latest developments with S/4HANA, including the integration of SAP Leonardo Machine Learning to create smart enterprise applications such as automated payment and invoice matching for finance, predictive maintenance for the supply chain team, and many more.

Stefan also showed off SAP CoPilot, the new machine-learning-driven enterprise equivalent to Alexa, Siri, or Cortana.

Swisscom has over 24,000 users on the system, and the database is now a quarter of the size it used to be thanks to SAP HANA in-memory compression. Because of the simplified architecture, the new system provide more functionality with 25% fewer data models. OneBI provides near-real-time data from over 40 different systems (only 6 are SAP).

The improved performance has enabled the creation of more complex and powerful dashboards, and the more flexible architecture means more of the development efforts can be carried out directly by the business.

The new front-end tools enable the business to do self-service analytics and create their own queries and dashboards. Complex data transformations have been moved into SAP HANA, reducing data loads and enabling real-time ETL processes, for both relational and big data workloads.

The result? The datawarehouse is now considered “a critical operational system” at Swisscom, according to von Lehsten.

BI governance was a critical part of the project. The team created detailed guideline documents for every aspect of the system. All the defined standards, checklists, etc. were put into a shared wiki and now any Swisscom employee can go and see what’s in the data warehouse, how the KPIs were defined, and how the data was prepared.

The BI governance system so impressed DSAG (the German SAP User Group), that they are now adopting it as one of their best practice approach. You can download Swisscom’s presentation’s here and you can listen to Tjarko von Lehsten summarize his project here.

Next, Karsten Haldenwang covered the latest news in SAP’s approach to modern data platforms, including the brand new SAP Data Hub, designed to refine enterprise big data. It allows organizations to create, reuse, and manage “data pipelines” across many different enterprise systems.

For example, a large drinks company used SAP Data Hub to integrate social media monitoring with their core data warehouse. SAP Data Hub was used to manage the process of collecting data from many different social data sources, load it into HDFS, and then analyze it with SAP Vora and SAP HANA.

For more details on the new SAP data hub and other Big Data developments, you can download Karsten’s presentation here.

Next Gerald Lewin and Rickard Antblad presented their work implementing S/4HANA at Bacardi, the largest family-owned Swiss company. The company produces many well-known brands such as Bombay Sapphire, Martini, Grey Goose, and Dewar’s.

Gerald Lewin talked about the importance of technology for companies like Bacardi today — and how hard it can be to keep up with the latest trends while maintaining current platforms.

He then reviewed their pragmatic roadmap for implementing S/4HANA, delivered as modular projects, delivered in phases over the next few years.

Bacardi believes that S/4HANA is a big opportunity for the company, allowing them to simply, consolidate, harmonize, and standardize data across their complex system landscape.

Then Rickard Antblad explained how the company used the SAP Cloud Platform for agile, iterative development, creating an easy-to-use, mobile-focused “InnovApp” for product managers throughout the company.

They had more questions from the audience than other presenters — maybe because they were giving away free bottles of their products to any attendee brave enough to ask!

In the afternoon, there was a great session by Laurent Rieu and Christian Michel covering all the different services available through the SAP Cloud Platform.

In the evening, I hosted an an CIO discussion with representatives of local companies Rolex, Bacardi, LDC, and Mercuria Energy Training. We discussed what Digital Transformation meant in the context of their organizations, who was responsible for leading change, and what more SAP could do to help.

The CIOs also asked for more assistance in promoting the “new SAP” within their organizations, who tended to still associated it with back-end systems, rather than digital business.

And one of the biggest takeaways for me was that more work needs to be done to spread the innovation message across the SAP ecosystem — the attendees mentioned that while they were very excited about new opportunities, many employees and partners seemed be less keen to promote the new ways of working.

The day ended with an exclusive concert from Swiss superstar singer Bastian Baker. He did a great job, with actress girlfriend Naomi Harris (aka Ms Moneypenny in Spectre) discretely looking on.

Overall, it was an value-packed, information-rich event. If you’re based in Suisse romande, I thoroughly recommend you try to attend next year!

Last week, I was invited to present the latest opportunities and challenges of Digital Transformation at the SAP Big Ideas executive evening event in beautiful Sofia, Bulgaria.

Rumyana Trencheva, Managing Director for SAP South East Europe kicked off the event, and there was a short speech from the brand-new German Ambassador to Bulgaria, Herbert Salber (he had started his role just four hours earlier, and this was his first official act!).

David Rowan, Editor-at-large for Wired Magazine UK then explained how to profit from the digital opportunity, with lots of real-world examples gathered from his interviews of technology pioneers around the world.

His big message was that digital change is real and happening faster than most of us realize. Exponential change — such as the dramatic falling cost of data storage, the price of solar electricity, the adoption of bitcoin, DNA sequencing and more — is threatening business models everywhere.

Incumbents must take proactive action, investing in defensive “moats” of data that give them a head-start on the trends of tomorrow.

For example, Facebook acquired a startup called Onavo. It’s an application that helps you keep track of your mobile data use. But as a result, it also knows how apps are being used, and which apps are trending — so if, say, a HouseParty app starts taking off, Facebook can be quick to provide the functionality themselves.

To succeed in the future, corporate culture is essential. Nokia started life as a tyre company, then evolved to sell paper, then electrical devices, then small electronics, and then quickly became the most popular phone company in the world. But at that point complacency set in, and they were notoriously dismissive of the introduction of the first iPhone a decade ago.

Over drinks, I discussed with David why some companies seem complacent in the face of so much change. He believed that it’s partly because most people haven’t had the opportunity to see the changes first hand: “I think everybody should try to spend some time in China — when you see what’s happening there, you’ll be more eager for change!”

Companies need to invest in constant change, using ideation to ask themselves the question “how can we be the kind of company that eats ourselves?” Appropriately-sized failures must be encouraged — and the lessons learned even celebrated with champagne!

The big danger, according to David, is “innovation theatre” — islands of innovation implemented as a thin veneer on the same old corporate organizations and processes. While each of these initiatives can provide some value, they can also slow down real innovation, by masking the need for more fundamental change.

One way to combat this — and to succeed with real transformation, rather than just implementing technology — is to align your organization and your employees around a clear mission, to concentrate on “building something meaningful”.

My presentation was on how SAP itself is “innovating with purpose”, with SAP Leonardo, a new digital innovation system designed to help our customers such as Stara innovate at scale and confidently redefine their business. You can access a copy of the presentation on Slideshare.

It was the Digital Shift conference in Brussels last week, exploring the impact of digital transformation on Belgian companies.

Over 2,000 attendees visited the technology-packed Innovation Village and attended sessions on topics such as The Hyperconscious Consumer, The Digitally Empowered Worker, The Borderless Enterprise, and IoT For A Smarter World. [Update: all the slides are now available for your review — there are some great ones from STIB-MVIB, Barco, Atlas Copco, Mohawk Industries and many more!].

Host for the day was Mark Raben, the CTO for SAP Belgium, who welcomed the guests and showed us that he has the brains for digital transformation — literally!

I had the honor of presenting the opening keynote Digital Transformation: Run and Win discussing the challenges and opportunities of digital transformation — and how SAP can help.

The future isn’t just about innovation, it’s about new ways of innovating — and vendors can do more to help. I covered the key elements of SAP Leonardo, the new SAP digital innovation system, and how customers such as Stara are improving agriculture through the internet of things and analytics. It’s all about “innovation with purpose” — helping improve business while making the world a better place.

In the Q&A, I was asked about a recent survey carried out by SAP Belgium showed that the three main concerns holding back digital transformation were:

Lack of know-how

Lack of digital strategy

Lack of the right people

These echo the problems we’ve seen elsewhere — and we try to address these directly in the SAP Leonardo system. To find out more about how other organizations have been overcoming these issues, take a look at The Digital Mindset research at SAP.com/ExecStudy.

Next, Nell Watson of Singularity University talked about “How to Thrive in an Unpredictable Future”, and explained why adapting to change is so hard: we attempt to apply linear thinking to an exponential world. The result is that we oscillate between being disappointed about what we have achieved while being amazed at others that have taken full advantage of the new opportunities.

According to Watson, if the 19th century was about harnessing the power of steam, and the 20th century about harnessing the power of electricity, then the 21st century will be about harnessing the power of intelligence as a utility, through a virtual pipe, to be called on as needed.

“If you can do something in one second, such as recognize a face in an image, a computer can already do it better than you. And if you put those in a loop, you can use that, for example, to pilot a vehicle and more.”

The road ahead is both scary and exhilarating — what can organizations do to make sure they’re not run over?

According to Nell, it’s about building an exponential organization, one whose impact or output is disproportionately large — at least 10x larger — compared to its peers because of the use of new technologies. It’s essential to rethink your products and services faced with the new possibilities, and create new business models.

A great place to start is “how can we enable others?”. People love it, and it helps foster a community that you can collaborate with to create better products and services. And if you’re good at managing communities, you can turn it into a platform, and help reach more people.

Finally, the best way to succeed is to use a shared, massively transformational goal as a central pillar of your plans, to provide employees and customers a vision of the future and a mission to collaborate around.

Next, McLaren Racing Formula One pilot Stoffel Vandoorne was interviewed by Mark Raben on how technology and analytics makes a difference to success and failure on the racetrack.

For the track sessions, I had the honor of hearing Shalini Mihta of SAP Hybris talking about how to deliver Exceptional Customer Experiences — a subject very close to my heart. She ended with a very appropriate quote from poet Maja Angelou:

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Robert McShane, the UK General Manager of Prayon, a century-old world leader in phosphates, gave an overview of why they chose SAP Hybris as part of their B2B Commercial Excellence plans.

The project was driven by Prayon’s need to move beyond being a simple supplier, to having a solution-provider approach, working with the customers on what they need, and fostering longer-term contracts.

“For us, it’s cloud or nothing — it provides more agility, moves away from fixed costs, and allow us to focus on business and innovation, instead of technology” — Robert McShane, Prayon

The E-Commerce solution was particularly important to be able to support emerging markets. The company couldn’t invest in lots of local staff in places like India, but the e-commerce solution allowed them to easily customize the online experience to support local conditions.

And the new marketing solution allows them to carry out “moment marketing” in the B2B world, with different scenarios for different events. For example, if there’s a legally-required change to consumer packaging, the information can now be targeted only to customers who had recent purchased the product, instead of the entire customer base, as in the past.

McShane ended with an anecdote explaining some of the reasoning behind the “one Prayon” approach, with everybody in the company working off the same basic set of information:

“I manage sales to the European part of a multinational. I went to visit the company, ready to explain why we were going to have to charge them more for our product. But just after the introductions, they told me they’d just had a call from a US colleague, who had given them $100 discount on the same product!

It made it clear to me that information sharing had to be improved. Our American colleagues use a different SAP system, but we were able to integrate their sales system into Cloud for Customer, and hopefully we’ll avoid these embarrassing moments in the future!”

The afternoon keynote was covered by Entrepreneur and Author Rasmus Ankersen, talking about how to eliminate complacency in companies faced with digital disruption.

The key theme was that the ability to reinvent a company when things are going well is more important than ever. Successful companies tend to become “selfie-stick” organizations that spend too much time on internal turf wars and not enough on discovering the next wave of customer needs. They tend to be organized to protect how they make money today, rather than protecting who they are and how they can serve their customers in the future:

After giving lots of examples of why organizations should be as skeptical about their successes as they are about their failures, he ended with the advice that “If it ain’t broke, consider breaking it!”.

In other words, i your company isn’t yet thinking about new opportunities such as digital transformation, it may be a sign that you need to rethink your company culture before it’s too late!

In the final keynote session, senior executives from global visualization vendor Barco discussed their experiences with digital transformation, supported by SAP.

Overall, it was a great event! You can see more pictures here, or take a look at my quick video compilation below:

Unleashing the Killer API. How traditional businesses are becoming technology revolutionaries, using APIs to let companies outside of the technology world become powerful tech players and unleash a torrent of innovation.

The New DNA of Change. Traditional change management won’t work in the era of digital transformation. Organizations need to learn how to change constantly and cope with the pain that it causes. Just about every industry is facing upstarts and forcing organizations to disrupt their established ways of doing business or face disruption. This article covers how new approaches at the organizational and individual level will be required to adapt to the constant change demanded by the digital future.

In addition, there are regular sections covering the top digital events, key Digitalists who are a making a difference (Amina Khan on biology-inspired design), and the Digitalist communities around the world (this quarter: Berlin).

And the final article is perhaps the most important: Only the Soft Survive. Jenny Dearborn, SVP and Chief Learning Officer at SAP, explains that the three-stage model of employment that dominates the global economy today – education, work, and retirement – will soon be blown out of the water. Soft skills, such as creativity, empathy, active listening, and emotional intelligence, will become critically important. As our ability to know more than those around us decreases, our need to be able to collaborate well (with both humans and machines) will help define our success in the future. Organizations have to help employees manage this shift by rethinking employee training and giving employees more time for learning courses relevant to the future needs of organizations and individuals.

]]>https://timoelliott.com/blog/2017/09/digitalist-magazine-q3-2017-unleashing-the-killer-api-the-power-of-soft-skills-more.html/feed013870SAP Leonardo: A Key Step in SAP’s Own Digital Transformationhttps://timoelliott.com/blog/2017/08/sap-leonardo-a-key-step-in-saps-own-digital-transformation.html
https://timoelliott.com/blog/2017/08/sap-leonardo-a-key-step-in-saps-own-digital-transformation.html#respondThu, 03 Aug 2017 14:36:00 +0000http://timoelliott.com/blog/?p=13833In order to understand the importance of SAP Leonardo, it vital to realize that it’s a key step in SAP’s own digital transformation.

Digital transformation is leading to rapid changes in every industry — and of course this also applies to the technology business and SAP itself.

New technology opportunities such as IoT, big data, and machine learning are making dramatic changes to the business landscape. Consumers have new requirements and expectations, and there are opportunities to deliver products and services in new ways. SAP Leonardo is an important element of SAP’s strategy to adapt to these changes.

Until now, SAP has typically been mostly associated with “systems of record” — the business applications that provide the essential foundation that keeps organizations running smoothly. But over the last few years, notably with the game-changing SAP HANA technology, SAP has worked very closely with its customers on business transformation, and learned a lot about what it takes to succeed, compared to more traditional IT implementation projects.

Unlike typical ERP upgrades, digital transformation involves creating new business models by bringing together the real and virtual worlds — and this means new ways of selling, new relationships with customers, partners, and suppliers, and new organizational structures.

SAP realized it had an opportunity to do more to support its customers in these efforts, with new ways of packaging its products and services to meet the new needs.

The result is the new SAP Leonardo.

There are already lots of great SAP Leonardo explainerblogs, articles, and interviews out there, but briefly, it’s a “digital innovation system” that was created to help SAP customers innovate at scale to redefine their business. In other words, Leonardo is designed to provide everything SAP customers need to actually succeed with digital transformation, not just technology.

But what’s particularly interesting is that SAP Leonardo was created using many of the same digital-transformation-enabling processes that are included in the system itself:

Design Thinking. Digital transformation requires a lot of technology, and that’s something SAP has a lot of experience in providing. But technology is only one factor in customer success. SAP used Design Thinking to look at the end-to-end digital transformation customer journey, identifying the real problems that were holding back success even when the technology worked perfectly. These turned out to include difficulties in prioritizing transformation projects, effective collaboration between IT and business units, the need for flexible prototyping, ensuring there were clear business cases, avoiding disconnected “islands of innovation”, and many more.

Reimagined products and services. The next step was to figure out how SAP could help customers overcome these non-technology factors. In looking at real-world customer implementations, SAP quickly realized that different business units around the world had pragmatically addressed many of the key barriers to success. But there was a lot of variation as to how and when these methods were being applied. The answer was to include in SAP Leonardo the best practice activities — such as Design Thinking workshops and the BUILD prototyping technology — that had been shown to work in the field and align them into a single coherent set of processes that could be applied consistently.

New business models. Digital transformation isn’t just about innovation, it’s about new ways of innovating. In particular, it requires a lot more experimentation, iteration, and flexibility. In traditional business application implementation, the scope of potential benefits are relatively easy to calculate. But when testing unproven new business models, it’s hard for organizations to commit to large investments until prototypes have been proven to work with trial customers.

This drove changes to traditional SAP pricing and packaging models. SAP Leonardo is priced to be easily “consumable”. For example, there are fixed-cost Industry Accelerators that include both technology and services allow customers to experiment quickly at a reasonable cost. SAP Leonardo projects are designed to enable real innovation in a particular business area in just a few weeks, while also providing the foundation for more comprehensive, company-wide transformation.

New ways of working. Successfully bringing all the elements of SAP Leonardo together from the customer’s point of view required new ways of coordinating SAP’s internal resources. Changes to SAP sales training and incentives were needed because digital transformation projects are often managed very differently from core IT business application initiatives. And to truly help SAP customers innovate at scale, new relationships were needed across the ecosystem of SAP partners, including services providers such as Accenture and Deloitte, and other key digital transformation giants such as Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

Iteration over time. Digital transformation is never “completed”, and so SAP Leonardo will also change over time. The system is designed to be flexibly updated based on the pragmatic experiences of what actually works. For example, it’s essential to make sure staff are motivated to help accelerate business model transformation, rather than resist it. And so, for example, it might make sense to extend SAP Leonardo to include elements of SAP’s SuccessFactors collaboration and performance management capabilities. And because companies want to be able to quickly experiment with multiple technologies without being slowed down by complex contract negotiations, customers have asked about more flexible “fixed price menu” options, and risk-based / profit-sharing options for new business approaches. To help guide these changes, SAP has launched the SAP Leonardo International Focus Group community to allow customers to give direct feedback.

From “Run” to “Win”. The bottom line is that today’s enterprise business applications are no longer just important for efficiency and reliability. They are the core foundation and enablers of the business models of the future. It’s not only about running the business better, but also using the technology to transform customer experiences and win new market share within rapidly-restructuring market boundaries.

SAP has long been known as a leader in providing organizations with the systems they need to take to step up their corporate growth. And now, by helping SAP customers dramatically scale up their digital transformation efforts, SAP Leonardo is set to help SAP maintain leadership in the fast-changing technology industry.

]]>https://timoelliott.com/blog/2017/08/sap-leonardo-a-key-step-in-saps-own-digital-transformation.html/feed013833A 100-Year-Old French Vision of Digital Transformationhttps://timoelliott.com/blog/2017/07/a-100-year-old-french-vision-of-digital-transformation.html
https://timoelliott.com/blog/2017/07/a-100-year-old-french-vision-of-digital-transformation.html#commentsMon, 24 Jul 2017 15:56:44 +0000http://timoelliott.com/blog/?p=13766I recently stumbled across a series of French postcards that were published in 1910, probably as part of a publicity campaign for groceries, predicting what life in the future would look like.

They depict a wonderful collection of then-current technology being used for far more far-reaching uses. For example, here’s the 1910 vision of Skype/Facetime video calls:

This machine does a scan of your body and automatically prints your closes on demand. That’s now on the edge of reality — there are now lots of 3D scanning systems available, and on-site production of clothes has been patented by Amazon!